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Recipes

Last year, when I was back in my hometown for the summer vacations, I began compiling the recipes of the food that was made at home. Food that my grandmother makes, some delicacies that my grandfather makes on the occasion too. It was the first time in a long time that I had eaten my grandmothers cooking, and a frightening thought hit me then— someday I may not be able to eat those things anymore.

So I started noting down the recipes, which was slightly difficult to do since their cooking was based more on their own guesses and rough calculation. They eyeballed everything; and it always turns out great. I have tried to make exact calculations for these recipes but they are very descriptive to make up for any lack of exact numerical information.

unni appam frying in ghee in the appam vessel, a few done ones on a plate next to it

Unni Appam

Serves 12 - 14

If there is something that I always associate with my grandmother when it comes to food, my memory invariably circles back to lip smacking unni appam. I have learnt how to make appam from my grandmother, a recipe she inherited from my great grandmother. I don’t know how long it has been passed down for, Amma says perhaps as long as we had jaggery.

Surprisingly it has only two ingredients- rice and jaggery. Made into a batter and deep fried in ghee. I wonder before the arrival of powdered jaggery and electric mixers how they went about grinding the batter.

Ingredients:

Instructions:

Rinse one cup of rice and soak it for two hours. Drain the water and drop the soaked rice into a mixer/grinder. Add a cup of powdered jaggery (add a quarter cup more if you’d like it sweeter, but not too much because then the batter may stick too much to the vessel you're frying in), and peel two cardamums into the mixer too.

Mix all that into a smooth batter. Its consistency should be pouring dosha batter like. Add a spoon or two of water if needed.

Adding too much water will make the appam too soft because it will absorb more ghee and then you might not be able to flip it over in the vessel.

Keep the appam vessel at the medium flame and fill each of the little cups up to half with ghee. Wait for the ghee to melt completely and heat up- you can tell by hovering your hand over the vessel. Once hot, you can begin to pour the batter into each of the cups (you may have to increase the flame a little for the first batch, after this keep the flame low). Then you wait till they're solid enough to flip. You can poke one in the middle and see if there was any batter sticking to it, in which case it isn't ready yet. Once its solid enough use your weapon of choice, a spoon and knife is what I use, to peel the appam from the corners and flip it. Then let them heat for a while more, not very long, and move them onto a plate to cool.